For whatever reason, wireless mechanical keyboards aren't particularly common. Perhaps it's because of a history of notoriously unreliable wireless keyboards and mice, or maybe it's just because you can't power that backlight off batteries for very long (and everyone seems to want a backlight these days, especially on a pricey keyboard). A detachable cable is the next best thing, but those aren't exactly common either. Fortunately, modding a Logitech G710+ to make its cable detachable is as easy as can be.

I love the idea of syncing files to the phone. But the Sync's 2.0 model is such that every linked device has the ability to pull every folder I have in my folder list. You no longer need to share each folder with every device specifically. This is great for convenience, but sucks for security, the classic trade-off.

Here's a syntax idea I keep coming back to over and over again. I'm sure it's completely impractical for a well-established language like C# to introduce it at this point, but that doesn't stop me wondering about it. It's a little crazy, and all the use-cases can be accommodated with more traditional operators, so... you've been warned.

The idea is to introduce operators and and or which would be used like so:

I bought a nearly new Logitech G710+ very cheap on eBay and it worked great for several days. Then, the Enter key became rather flaky: half the time, it would not register at all, and the other half it would register twice. The seller offered to exchange it, but since it shipped from the US and the exchange was going to take ages, I decided to try to repair it instead.

If you have dedicated servers at OVH and are wondering how to configure FTP backup space access, you've come to the right place! You might have noticed that this information is available in many languages but not English, and is not all that clear either. While you can just ask OVH support and they will invariably respond reasonably quickly (kudos for that!), it's still a few hours' wait, so I thought I'll write it up to save others the wait.

MediaWiki v1.19.5 was released today with a number of vulnerabilities fixed. If you install this patch on a system with PHP 5.2.x, you will get a notice printed all over your wiki, stating something like this: "Use of undefined constant E_USER_DEPRECATED".

This happens because while MediaWiki v1.19 claims to support PHP 5.2.3+, patch v1.19.5 accidentally introduces a dependency on PHP 5.3.0+.

The built-in pseudo-random number generator in .NET, System.Random, is suitable for a wide range of applications. It offers a reasonable speed and a very reasonable level of randomness. But if you need a lot of random numbers, and aren't too worried about their quality, you might go looking for an alternative.

One such alternative is a family of algorithms discovered by George Marsaglia, collectively called Xorshift. Xorshift is fast, has a period of around 2128 and passes Marsaglia's Diehard tests of randomness, provided the initial state is good.

But just how much faster is it than System.Random, given a C# implementation? Let's find out!

I'm playing with an ASUS Transformer tablet, which is interesting in that it has a hardware keyboard which can be unplugged. I thought I'll post a few things about how this works in practice, from the perspective of a keyboard addict. Not the kind of thing most reviews mention, nor indeed the kind of thing most people care about.

I'll try to avoid repeating things that the average review already mentions. Beware: this article is nit-picky.